THIS TIME ROUND

Co­rum’s iconic Golden Bridge be­comes even more ar­chi­tec­tural in the Golden Bridge Round

Like the Bub­ble and the Coin watch, the Golden Bridge is one of Co­rum’s cen­tral pil­lars. The orig­i­nal Golden Bridge was pre­sented in 1980 with a long, rec­tan­gu­lar case con­tain­ing a unique baguette move­ment. Oc­cu­py­ing lit­tle space in the cen­tral ver­ti­cal sec­tion, this man­ual-wind­ing cal­i­bre has all its gear train’s com­po­nents laid out in a lin­ear fash­ion along its length. An en­tire col­lec­tion has sprung from this ini­tial re­lease, with case de­signs grad­u­ally be­com­ing bar­rel shaped and ex­e­cuted in both pre­cious and tech­ni­cal ma­te­ri­als to please all palates. Dec­o­ra­tive el­e­ments such as dragon and phoenix fig­urines carved from gold have also been of­fered to play with the avail­able space af­forded by the move­ment, but the lat­ter re­mains the star of the watch.

Co­rum’s novel­ties for Baselworld this year may seem dom­i­nated by the nu­mer­ous Bub­ble mod­els, but the brand also in­tro­duced the Golden Bridge Round watch. This isn’t the first time the Golden Bridge has ap­peared in a round case; a pre­vi­ous in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the shape has been done at least once be­fore, in a small lim­ited pro­duc­tion run for an an­niver­sary oc­ca­sion.

For 2016, the Golden Bridge is of­fered in a round case for good, com­plete with a twist. In­stead of leav­ing the space at the sides of the move­ment void as in most Golden Bridge watches, the watch’s de­signer, Dino Modolo, has de­cided to cre­ate a trib­ute to San Fran­cisco’s Golden Gate Bridge – the 2,727-me­tre long sus­pended bridge that served as the in­spi­ra­tion for this watch model in the first place. Rose gold sculp­tures now flank the move­ment, and take the form of lat­tice frame­works mim­ick­ing the Golden Gate Bridge. This piece of art can be ap­pre­ci­ated at all an­gles, thanks to the use of a crys­talline ring which forms the case’s mid­dle. MOVE­MENT Man­ual-wind­ing Co­rum Cal­i­bre CO113 with 40-hour power re­serve